The Environmental Protection Agency announced last Wednesday that Alaska’s revised plan to improve air quality in the Fairbanks and North Pole is good to go.
The new — and final — state roadmap eliminates a Biden-era regulation that would’ve required people in the area to get an energy rating before selling their homes, and Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation is now in the process of repealing the requirement from the state’s administrative code. The regulation was set to take effect at the beginning of next year.
The EPA’s decision may mark the end of a yearslong policy tug-of-war – but only if the remaining methods to clean up the air succeed.
Energy audits removed
Scientists and state officials have repeatedly said smoke from wood stoves contributes the most to the Fairbanks area’s notoriously poor wintertime air quality. Energy audits aim to collect information on homes’ energy efficiency and heating systems, like wood stoves, then compile that data and give residences a rating.
But local realtors and elected officials argued that requiring them in the nonattainment area as part of the plan would’ve been a mistake. Heather Ferguson, a real estate agent and the legislative chair for the Greater Fairbanks Board of Realtors, said she’s glad federal and state officials are dropping the regulation.
“The energy rating itself is not doing anything to improve the air quality,” she said. “It was a data grab on … like the biggest thing a consumer can own.”
Ferguson also said paying for the mandated energy ratings would’ve burdened home sellers, and that the limited availability of energy raters would’ve created a bottleneck in the local housing market. According to the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, there are currently four qualified energy raters in the Fairbanks North Star Borough.
“It was going to cripple our real estate market until we got more auditors,” Ferguson said.
Air quality plan gets final approval
The state’s federally-required plan to improve Fairbanks air quality has undergone multiple iterations and a fair amount of turbulence since 2009. That’s when the feds first determined that the amount of harmful particulate matter of 2.5 microns or less, or PM2.5, was exceeding federal standards in Fairbanks and North Pole air.
In 2019, the nonattainment area was reclassified from “moderate” to “serious.” The finding forced the State of Alaska to develop a new blueprint for how to fix the problem, called the Serious Implementation Plan (SIP).
In 2023, as part of the problem’s more recent history, the EPA decided some portions of the SIP weren’t good enough. That triggered a penalty called a conformity freeze, which has since been limiting how local and state transportation officials can use federal funds for infrastructure projects in the nonattainment area.
The state DEC then spent more than a year seeking to address the EPA’s concerns, and in early January, soon before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the administration under then-President Joe Biden proposed approving a revised version of the state plan.
The next month, after the public comment period on that proposed approval had ended, both the Fairbanks City Council and Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly passed resolutions urging federal officials to reconsider the mandated energy audits, which had been introduced in the SIP as a “compromise” with the EPA following the 2023 disapproval. The EPA under Trump then reopened public comment on the plan this March, citing local pushback to the home energy rating regulation.
In last week’s announcement, the federal agency decided the state’s air quality improvement measures still fulfill the Clean Air Act, even without the home energy audits. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said “Alaskans shouldn’t have to sacrifice their way of life to protect human health and the environment,” and that the state’s plan “proves that both goals are achievable.”
But Patrice Lee, a Fairbanks resident and spokesperson for the group Citizens for Clean Air, thinks Zeldin is wrong.
“To sacrifice human health and the environment is a recipe for destroying lifestyle,” she said in a prepared statement. “Nothing puts a damper on lifestyle like not being able to breathe, or heart problems.”
In response to follow-up questions, Lee also said the plan doesn’t have enough teeth, and that repealing the audits just weakens it further.
“It’s voluntary whether or not you change out your wood stove. It’s voluntary now whether or not you tell a buyer what the status of the home heating system is that they’re potentially going to purchase,” she said. “Everything is voluntary.”
What’s next
Though the EPA has approved the plan, Fairbanks air quality still must get in line with federal standards by the end of 2027, and Lee said she’s not convinced that’ll happen.
According to state data, the monitoring site at Hurst Road in North Pole continues to register the worst air quality in the area. PM2.5 levels there dropped significantly between 2012 and 2018, but they’ve since stayed pretty stagnant, and the levels are still roughly double federal maximums for the pollutant.
In the approved plan, the state said that 2027 reflects reaching attainment “as expeditiously as practicable.” State Division of Air Quality Director Jason Olds said by email Monday that if the Fairbanks area still has too much PM2.5 in its air at that time, the EPA would make a “finding of failure,” and the state would have to amend the plan yet again.